lists

Obviously, the hashtag #carefreeblackfolks cannot completely apply to a book someone would want to read; a book about a carefree person is going to be pretty boring. A book’s protagonist still needs a conflict, but their troubles do not have to be race related, or about, as we tend to refer to it, The Struggle.

Representation of fat people in YA has tended to be pretty dismal. As Kelly wrote last year, too often fat characters are portrayed as people “who have to overcome their weight in order to be seen as worthwhile or able to achieve their dreams, whatever they may be.” Happily, more YA novels with complex, fat characters have been coming out; pun intended, because now there are enough that I’ve been able to make this list of fat-positive YA that also has positive queer representation. Only one of these fat-positive queer YA books has a queer, fat main character (please, authors and publishers, we need more!) but all of these are solid both in terms of fat and queer representation.

Ready for your TBR list to explode? I’ve gathered the 100 best sci-fi fantasy novels by female authors and there is sooooo much reading goodness to dig into. From YA to adult lit, from magical realism to epic fantasy to post-apocalyptic sci-fi feminism, from short stories to series, there’s a book on this list for every single reader.

It feels like 2016 was a year where books by and about people of color in the YA world were few and far between. I remember being asked at the beginning of the year to name some, and now, as the year comes to a close, I am still naming the same few.

Have you seen Moana yet? If you haven’t, may I suggest rectifying that, whether or not you have kids? The film, which is an entire animation starring brown characters, was an outstanding story of a headstrong, empowered, fierce young girl and her being selected as “the chosen one” to save her people. It’s full of adventure, of mythology, of life, of color, and features some elements that are surprisingly unseen in Disney films — Moana has two happily married parents and there is zero, absolutely zero, romance in the film.

Buying gifts for avid readers can be difficult. You want, of course, to buy them a book, but how do you know they don’t have it already? Do you know them well enough to know the book’s in their wheelhouse? And what if there’s some esoteric reason why they prefer the paperback over the hardback, a used copy over a new copy?